Author, poet. Satirist, E.L. Doctorow died at the age of 84 after contributing a lot of literary work and thought to the Modern American Literature.

The writer, poet, thinker, political commentator and satirist E. L. Doctorow passed away on July 21st at the age of 84. Known for his historically imaginative writing style and his ability to put his own spin on the characters, the writer passed away in his home in Manhattan due to complications onset by lung cancer.

Born in the Bronx, Edgar L. Doctorow was named by his father after another writer Edgar Allen Poe. Maybe his father was cognizant that his son, one day, might be as effective with the pen as Poe was for Edgar Doctorow knew he wanted to be a writer when he was just 9.

He later on told in an interview (via NYTimes) that at that age something clicks inside you and you read and read and this question pops in your head that how do they write it?

That was the question he answered for himself when he wrote about a musician Karl he told his teacher that he had interviewed. It was so good with impeccable details that the teacher wished it to be published but Doctorow kept it to himself.

He revealed decades later that Karl was a figment of his imagination. Doctorow left the Bronx at 16 to attend Kenyon College in Ohio, then returned to New York for a year of graduate school at Columbia University, where he met his wife Helen Setzer.

He was drafted into the Army and stationed in Germany during the mid-1950s, and eventually found himself back in the city of his birth, working as a “reader” for a movie studio.

He got tired of his job of reading Westerns calling them boring and mild, for approving them to be made into movies and tried his own luck by venting his creative frustration into a parody that turned into the first chapter of a more serious novel set in Dakota Territory during its 19th century boom. That book was “Welcome to Hard Times,” published in 1960.

Others soon followed; science fiction story “Big As Life” in 1966; his 1971 reworking of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg trial, “The Book of Daniel.” His claim to fame was however with the publication of “Ragtime,” a sly, splashy 1975 novel that tracks the intersecting lives of New Yorkers both famous and fictional through the early years of the 20th century.

His other successful books include Billy Bathgate, The March and Andrew’s Brain. That included with the dozen novels, three short story collections and countless commentaries on culture and politics makes him a great writer that should always remain a significant part of history.